Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Review – Nothing Like The Simulations

If you’re a Star Wars fan who has been even slightly online in the past week, you’ll know all about the Battlefront Classic Collection. More specifically, how fumbled the entire thing is.

This hotly-anticipated remaster of two of the most beloved Star Wars games of all time launched with just three dedicated servers, despite hitting 10,000 players on release day alone. Getting into a match is a headache unless you’re willing to brave peer-to-peer servers and risk the inevitable jank of a host with McDonald’s public wi-fi. ‘Use the rubberbanding, Luke’ – no thanks.

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There Is Nothing Classic About The Star Wars Battlefront Collection

Aspyr has really dropped the ball on this one.

Originally developed by the now-defunct Pandemic Studios, the Battlefront games are shooters that fill in the gaps of the Star Wars universe from both the original trilogy and the prequels.

We see iconic battles taking place beyond the lens of our favourite heroes saving the galaxy, stepping into the shoes of foot soldiers on the front line. The second game even has a story mode all about the 501st Legion, Clones and Stormtroopers who operated under Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader and how they helped facilitate the rise of the Empire. There are also your usual multiplayer modes like deathmatch, hero assault, capture the flag, and space assault. Many of these were ahead of the curve back in the 2000s.

Battlefront and its sequel are great games that stand the test of time, but Aspyr’s remaster is an insult to their legacy. The first thing you see when opening the Classic Collection is a haphazardly put-together game selection menu that you can only navigate once you’ve pressed down on the D-pad. Even then, it’s incredibly unclear which game you’re highlighting. If that doesn’t set off red flags, you might need to adjust your visor.

Once you’re over the first hurdle, the main menus of each game are more or less the same as they were in their original releases (which are bizarrely more intuitive than the new selection screen), but there’s a noticeable lack of modern quality-of-life options. Aspyr tried to remedy this by adding a new “Quick Play” feature for multiplayer post-launch, bypassing the server menu. But given the lack of dedicated servers, you’re often thrown into peer-to-peer ones which rely entirely on the host’s connection. To the countless people out there creating games from what feels like a mobile hotspot, please stop.

Quick play also makes no distinction between private and public lobbies, so you’ll often hit an ‘enter password’ wall and be sent right back to the start of the queue. Worse yet, you can’t party up, making it a hassle to play with friends. True to 2005, you’ll need to find a server with free space, shout the name out, and hope you all get in before it’s full. Sure, it’s authentic to the old-school experience, but it shouldn’t be this difficult 20 years later.

The most exciting part about these games getting remastered in the first place was that multiplayer would be repopulated, more stable, and easier to navigate, but it’s not worth the headache right now. Instead, they’re both off-puttingly janky and lack all the polish you’d expect of a modern port. This duology is more likely to scare newcomers away and push old-timers back to the originals.

While you’re likely to have a better time crawling into a warm tauntaun carcass than trying multiplayer, the singleplayer modes are still incredible. The 501st Legion gives us a glimpse into a completely different perspective on Order 66, one where the Clones knowingly betrayed the Jedi, while Galactic Conquest sees us plan out the various wars from across the six movies, choosing battles to earn credits that we can spend on new troop types and bonuses like getting to play as your favourite heroes, turning these hardened battles into brief power fantasies, a feeling that still strikes true even almost two decades later.

The Classic Collection at least preserves the solo experience, though it does little to embellish it. If anything, it’s a worse way to play, given the glitched scope-in view, vastly larger download size, lack of an invert option, and myriad other bugs. It brings the games to modern consoles, but if you have a Steam Deck or PC handy, just play the originals. The controls are practically the same, anyway.

Messy doesn’t even begin to cover the state that the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection launched in, and even though updates are rolling out to make things more tolerable, the ‘improvements’ are loaded with issues that only make matters worse. This might be the worst port since the Silent Hill HD Collection, so get ready to warn away newcomers until it’s fixed.

Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection

Reviewed on PS5.

Pros

• Singleplayer modes being made readily available on current-gen consoles is amazing for preservation.

Cons

• Incredibly buggy launch.
• Multiplayer is a mess.
• Little in the way of modern quality-of-life improvements.